Quotes on Paint

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else

I do the same thing everyday. I go to work and paint. I try to turn out as many pictures as I can.

It's hard to be fully creative without structure and constraint. Try to paint without a canvas. Creativity and freedom are two sides of the same coin. I like the best of both worlds. Want freedom? Get organized. Want to get organized? Get creative.

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.

Your style is the way you talk in paint.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.

You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.

Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.

l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out. And so the galleries began to hang my work in their best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive. It was precise. It was 'finished'.

My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.

If they want to come out and watch me paint or dig potatoes or mend fences, I don't care. I don't do interviews not because I have anything to hide, but when you retire, the word has a meaning to me. It's a place in life, a part of the journey. You just don't quit work. You develop an attitude where you can do what you please.

The remarks about my reaching the age of Social Security and coming to the end of the road, they jolted me. And that was good. Because I sure as hell had no intention of just sitting around for the rest of my life. So I'd whip out the paints and really go to it.